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Students answer emails and play minesweeper. An unintelligible stream of sound flows from a figure in the front of the room.

No, this isn’t a class from Charlie Brown — it’s the all-too-frequent reality at Harvard.

There’s no need to go over the studies showing the negative effects of technology in the classroom. After all, for our generation, COVID-19 online classes are a not-so-distant memory of isolation and apathy. Yet Harvard continues to allow a classroom culture where students hide behind laptop screens.

Calling all neglected teaching fellows and Jonathan Haidt groupies: There is an answer to Harvard’s academic prioritization crisis. Unlike many of Harvard’s problems, it’s an easy fix: Ban laptops from classes and lecture halls.

Harvard’s administration, amidst their push to encourage students to prioritize academics, has identified screens as a barrier to learning but left classroom screen policy up to individual professors and departments. Many professors still haven’t taken the leap into luddism. It’s time for the College to take a top-down approach to screens in the classroom.

The College has taken other steps like eliminating the option to take General Education and Quantitative Reasoning with Data courses pass/fail, apparently based on the belief that harsher grading can pressure students to dedicate themselves to the process of learning.

If the goal of these changes is incentivizing love of learning, why does the solution focus on grades? Grade-obsessed students aren’t usually the ones who revel in the process of learning; they’re the ones packing their schedules with easy-A classes and curating a Linkedin profile.

Banning screens is an answer to students’ academic neglect: It would increase classroom engagement as well as create a culture where the benefits of in-person learning can be fully realized.

Currently, a sort of laissez faire classroom prevails: students who want to learn will listen to the lecture, and the rest should feel free to email, text, study for other classes, shop, apple-snake game ’til they drop.

Unfortunately, even for would-be luddites, barriers remain in the fight for classroom engagement: The incessant multitasking of peers signals to impressionable first-years that multitasking is the norm and that paying attention to lecture isn’t.

And even if the pro-learning students manage to overcome underproductivity guilt, we are presented with yet another barrier to class engagement: the distraction of the activities on screens in front of us.

Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching acknowledges these problems while avoiding an explicit device ban in the classroom. Instead, the Center’s technology policy says that “using technology judiciously can encourage class participation.”

Even a University committee recognizes the problem: A report published last February proposed that faculty should dissuade the use of cell phones and internet-enabled technology during class as well as harshen absence policy and grading standards. The latter two policies now appear in the Student Handbook. What is stopping the College from implementing a screen-free classroom policy?

Sadly, it seems the College is afraid of tearing screen-addicted students away from their devices and asking for their full attention in class. No professor wants to take the drug away from the addict.

As it stands, the benefits of in person education — socializing, engaging more thoroughly with the material, and learning how to conduct oneself in places where we have to speak publicly — can feel like they’re as good as gone. Instead, it often seems that we’ve doubled down on the sterile, joyless dystopia of online school.

By banning laptops in classrooms, Harvard’s administration can take the choice away from professors or TFs who might be scared to antagonize themselves while making a concrete step towards becoming a place that prioritizes people who care about learning.

Perhaps if students were actually forced to listen in class (or at least to not actively ignore), they’d end up taking more classes they find legitimately interesting, and embracing the sort of vulnerability that comes with making eye contact with a professor and with peers.

Learning in a Harvard classroom is a privilege. Let’s not let laptops get in the way.

Amelia F. Barnum ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.